Dark Peril Page 0,140

candlelight while she turned the idea over and over in her mind. Conversion. Becoming Carpathian. Living in the ground. Drinking blood instead of eating. She could do all those things as long as she was with him--but she couldn't give up the other half of who she was. She was jaguar. She would always be jaguar. Her cat was her.

"What happens if I don't convert?"

He shrugged, the movement easy and casual. "I told you. We would both grow old and die together." "You would stay with me?"

"You are my lifemate. You are the woman I love. There is no other answer. And Solange," he leaned in to her, so that her gaze was held by his, "there would never be regrets."

She believed him. That changed things instantly for her. He would give it all up for her without regret. Everything in her loved him, yearned for him, wanted desperately to give him back all the things he'd given to her. She felt a little helpless not knowing what women did for their men, but even if she didn't know, she would forge her own path, just as he seemed to be doing with her.

She picked up a slice of mango. "Would my jaguar be destroyed?"

"I do not have the answer for that. What happened with your cousin?"

"She said her jaguar made the conversion difficult, but she feels her cat with her, yet not in the same way."

"Your blood is different from your cousin's?"

She nodded. "Her mother was a royal, but not her father. The lineage is all but wiped out now. There is only Brodrick and me. I know I am the last of my kind. I can't save our people. I've known that for some time, and as sad as that is, it is the truth. Our time is over." She took a breath. "I want to protect my jaguar. She's as much me as the warrior and the woman. Is there a way to ease in to the Carpathian world and see if she is accepting?"

"Once I am able to gather the information we need, we can try one blood exchange to see how she takes it. Right now, if I took your blood, it would kill the remaining parasites in my body, and I need them to gain entrance into the vampire conclave taking place this next rising."

She tried to breathe evenly, to keep her heart from pounding. "We should test how far I have to be away from you in order for the parasites not to react to my presence. I'm a good marksman and can make shots over a good distance, but not with the crossbow. I need that to kill the vampires."

He nodded. "I thought your crossbow was ingenious."

"I'd like to take credit, but Riordan, Juliette's lifemate, helped me come up with it. He mixed this great accelerant for me because vampires seemed to be showing up more and more in this area. We knew Brodrick had made some kind of an alliance with them. It took a while to figure out why. Everyone thought he was controlled by the vampires, but I knew differently. I knew they couldn't influence him." "I have a difficult time fathoming why a man would sell out his entire species without a vampire controlling his mind, because he has to know the vampires are influencing his fellow jaguar-men who do not have his particular brand of protection."

"He's wholly evil," Solange said, unconsciously lowering her voice. She shivered, remembering the look in Brodrick's eyes as he slashed the throat of her six-year-old friend because she couldn't shift. "He enjoys his power over women. My aunt told me how he dragged my mother out of the house by her hair after he killed her parents, then held her captive for months. She was very broken when he let her go. She was only seventeen at the time, and he was terribly cruel. He enjoys hurting women, and in his position as leader of the people, the men embraced his philosophy that the women were to serve their every desire and they could treat them however they wanted. Brodrick believes all women are less than he is, and that he has every right to hurt them for his own entertainment."

Dominic took a slice of mango and held it to her mouth until she took a bite. She knew he was worried about her not eating enough; she could read it in his mind. So she ate the fruit and felt a